Brexit – which at the moment looks like an Austin Allegro hitting a brick wall at a moderate speed, collapsing like a crisp packet and killing its union jack clad occupants

On to things that made up my week:

Back in the day, consumer products brands used to do a lot of advertising to build brand equity. It is interesting that marketing thinking is starting to sway back to that being a good idea again. Reality check, it never was a bad idea, but marketers focused too much on short term effectiveness in isolation. Agencies were fine with this due to the profits available on digital media sales.

An example of the power in brand advertising was work by McCann Worldgroup in Hong Kong for Nescafe Black. Which paid homage to a well known hair dye advert from the 1980s. Bigen hair dye went big on reach and repetition during the 1980s; its recall and memorability helps Nescafe’s ad work 30 years later. Actor Kenneth Tsang is probably not disappointed by the ongoing work either.

This video on Amazon sponsored brands ad format reminds me a lot of the arbitrage opportunities that used to be common in early search advertising. It goes to underscore how much Amazon has taken away from Google et al in terms of product and shopping related searches.

MIT released a video on how self driving cars can work on country roads (without the complex prebuilt LIDAR maps associated with current driverless cars efforts)

Neopets was one of them child oriented social environments with games of a similar vintage to Habbo Hotel and Disney’s Club Penguin. It also has an odd startup story behind it. Watch the video and be amazed

Wu-Tang Clan celebrate the 25th anniversary of their break out album 36 Chambers with an appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk concert.